My Dead Soviet Boyfriend

by Ka Bradley

One of the first books I ever edited was a diary. It was kept between 1935-6 by one Ivan Petrovich Chistyakov, about whom very little is known. He was a Muscovite who had been expelled from the Communist Party during the purges of the late 1920s and early 1930s. He commanded an armed guard unit on a section of BAM, the Baikal-Amur railway, which was built by forced labour. (I am here reproducing verbatim the copy I wrote for the book’s jacket, which also refers to his death at ‘the front’ — I seemingly decided not to say which — in 1941. Well, we all make mistakes, although not all of us do it on the back flaps of published books.)

I have an almost physical recall for the edit, because I fell in love with this man who had died half a century or so before I was born. I don’t mean ‘fell in love’ in the classic publishing sense, where ‘I fell in love with this book’ can be synonymous for ‘I quite liked it and read it all the way through’. I mean I ‘fell in love’ in that there is a single extant photo of Chistyakov, and for the next six-and-a-half years a printout of this photo was pinned on the wall of my office.

The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard is both revealing and frustratingly unrevealing. In an interview with VICE, its translator, Arch Tait, describes Chistyakov as ‘a quick-witted, rather crotchety bachelor who liked playing practical jokes’, and the translation flawlessly captures that voice. Chistyakov frequently laments the duncery and dullness of the men around him, the brutalising nature of the job, and the disconnect between Party propaganda and lived reality.

Chistyakov writes poetry and sketches the landscape. He gets ever so lyrical about the spring, but you would, wouldn’t you, if winter was so cold you’d watched prisoners playing poker using the frostbitten fingers they’d hacked off as gambling chips. He misses the cinema. The sound of a violin tears his heart to shreds. He’s abject with a melancholy that slides off into depression or bitterness on a daily basis. I cry when I see videos of scared animals; imagine what effect this diary had on me.

Towards the end of the record, Chistyakov’s diary is found and gets him into trouble, which suggests, to me, that he was writing only for himself. Surely, then, he’d have recorded as much of ‘everything’ as he could gather up each day. But he never mentions his family or his friends back in Moscow. He doesn’t tell us who he left behind or who he misses, only what. He leaves gaps that strike me as self-censoring, cautious where his criticisms aren’t.

Crucially, he never speaks of romantic or sexual desire. Perhaps he imagined there would be a future son or daughter who might take their dad’s revolutionary diary in hand, some time in a beautiful socialist future, and he wanted to spare them more NSFW musings. I doubt he imagined that his diary would make it all the way to the 21st century, and some editor in Britain would moonily refer to him as her ‘dead Soviet boyfriend’, bodyslamming into the gaps he left in his writing.

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I’ve kept diaries on and off since I was about ten. I was most prolific aged 14-17, at school, and 19-20, in my second year at university. Most of my 20s are unrecorded; perhaps causally, I started tweeting a lot more and writing for public consumption (stories, reviews, etc) around the age of 26.

My old diaries are miserable texts, particularly the one I kept at university. They are also painfully self-conscious. A generous person might suggest they are juvenilia, and I was developing my ‘voice’; I can tell you now that if I received a manuscript written in that voice, I would not only reject it but I would cycle all the way to the writer’s house and slap them in the face with a big vegetable.

The reason they have this strained voice is that I had imagined a future reader who might find these records historically significant, who might admire my style and skill in conveying the era I lived through. Yet my diaries don’t portray much in the way of cultural context or societal observation, are instead filled with gossip and reflections on my emotional/psychological states. I often used code names — a little game for the future reader — some of which are so incomprehensible to me now that I cannot work out who all these people I have sworn vengeance against and besmirched the characters of so rhapsodically are.

In late summer 2020, between lockdowns, having gone through a number of life-changing personal upheavals — most of which hadn’t been my choice — I re-read my university diary. It offered me some paltry relief. I was miserable in 2020 but at least I wasn’t miserable and a bitch. Maybe change. . . is good? Must investigate. On 2 December 2020, I started writing a diary again. I’ve kept it consistently, though not daily, ever since.

I don’t want this diary to reach anyone but me, so I’m freed of the self-imposed need to impress some moony editor in the 22nd century. My annoying stylistic quirks grow like mould the longer I spend on a single entry, but I’ve found having a personal writing practice has encouraged me to think, observe and write in a simplified way. I strain only for clarity — even if that means repetition. I can’t tell you what a relief it’s been to unyoke myself from ‘good writing’. No one is owed my skill or my sense or my thematic coherence; it’s just a record, for me, of what I felt a week ago.

If I imagine a reader, I imagine writing it as an unaddressed letter to Chistyakov, across the decades that separate us. He would be frustrated by the gaps I leave too — how the vaccine rollout is going, how a VPN works, my opinions on the publishing industry, whether the revolution is fomenting in Walthamstow. But it’s a deal I keep with him: we write about what we want to. We are not ‘a visceral and immediate description of a place and time’ (me on the cover again) — we’re two people who miss the cinema and consider that worth recording.